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MONDAY-FRIDAY

I've been jumping onto the Internet and working up my genealogy just ALL the time this week. Today I finally stopped long enough to put another batch of chili in the crockpot, roast a couple turkey thighs and bake a small apple crisp. Now it's back to Ancestry.com. I'm re-building mostly stuff I already know now but I want to get it all in this new site so I can start really "working" it. A lot of it is still learning the program's capabilities and checking details.

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Erich spent almost every free minute doing that for a good year or so when he started researching in earnest! He still spends a *lot* of time evenings and weekends working with stuff he's gotten from the Family History Center here.

Yep, it's addictive. It's like a puzzle that keeps increasing it's borders.

I'm assuming you went ahead and paid for ancestry. But if not, I've been having good luck with a combination of beta.familysearch.org for marriages and stuff, and it will find censuses too. And then HeritageQuest for the census images - it's free for Nebraska residents, just enter your drivers license #. http://nebraskaccess.ne.gov/scripts/hqpassword.asp The advantage of this is that it's super easy to save the census images - they are just simple GIF files, while Ancestry is more difficult. But the search on HeritageQuest is exact - it won't find spelling variations. So I use the "Ancestry teasers" search function search.ancestry.com to find out the spelling to use, and then HeritageQuest to find he exact page.

With the census pages on Ancestry I sometimes do "broad" searches -- as in I know the people should be in a particular township so I put in wild cards or such to pull up pages of people from a particular census. yes, it is slow to go through the listings to find who I need, but sometimes I manage to find collaterals that way as well. And that way I also see if the name is spelled oddly. I have put in a lot of name corrections to Ancestry. Afterall, the census takers handwriting isn't always the best and I'm not sure that the people who were paid to do the data entry were the best trained.

I'm not a Nebraska resident (east coast myself) but I might look into the other search places once I finished my multi-year entering and re-checking data project.

I found about HeritageQuest access thru a lecture from a Family History Center lady. The state pays a fee, and all libraries and individuals can access it. Way cheaper than each library paying a separate fee.

You might check into the possibility that your state also has done something like this. If you have a state Library commission, that would be the place to start. My local librarian didn't even know the password, since no one had requested it. (and the State library commission sends out lots of passwords to various web-based stuff.)

I did Ancestry once, but couldn't afford to keep it up. And I really love being able to save the census pages with a simple right-click "save image as" I could never get ancestry images to save quite so easily.

I've been in the middle of a very long project of reentering my family data. (I had a corruption somehwere in the file and it made my FTM program go bonkers.) So when FTM2009 came out as an upgrade I got it and rather than direct import I added branches one by one. But, as I did so I was verifying information. As in actually entering notation credits if I still had the original research. And if I found documentation on Ancestry i added it as well. But I do not credit the family pedigrees ont here, sicne so many of them have mistakes. I do use them to expand a possible family line, but it goes in as "needs to be proven."

I am in the last legs of entering my husband's lines, and then I get the joy of going through my long list of To-Do for major research. Should keep me busy for 20 years or so. :)

I find some of Ancestry's sources great. Some of the searching techniques are odd. I have to get creative sometimes.

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